Data migration refers generally to the processes of moving computer data from one computer location to another. For instance, an administrator may facilitate maintenance or updates by transferring applications and/or memory from one operating system or computer to another. While necessary, data migration can pose a tremendous challenge and risk to businesses, government agencies and individuals that depend upon uninterrupted computer access. Too often, software installation problems occur. Such problems may be attributable to faulty program code or unforeseeable interactions within a processing environment. For example, stored data may be lost or corrupted during a transfer. Such problems can result in costly system errors and downtime.
Problems relating to data transfers may be compounded in logically partitioned environments, where unique resource sharing and access practices may present additional considerations. Logical partitioning provides a programmed architecture suited for assigning and sharing computing assets. A partition may logically comprise a portion of a machine's physical processors, memory and other resources. As such, an administrator may allocate the same resources to more than one partition. Each partition may additionally host an operating system, in addition to multiple virtual processors. An underlying program called a hypervisor, or partition manager, assigns and dispatches physical processors to each virtual processor. Each partition typically has unique connections for communicating with a network. In this manner, each partition operates largely as if it is a separate computer.
During a migration, the state of the migrating logical partition, including applicable memory, processor/register state information, and connection information regarding physical interface/discs associated with the virtual partition components, etc., is transferred to another logical partition of another computer. The migration may be motivated to accommodate new hardware or program updates on the computer of the migrating logical partition. Oftentimes the migrated logical partition is eventually returned to the original logical partition location.
The migrating partition ideally continues work without interruption on the new logical partition, e.g. transparently. To this end, the migrating partition may run in a virtualized environment during the migration to be separate from the physical hardware underneath. The hypervisor may be responsible for providing the infrastructure that allows for the migration to occur from the source logical partition to a target logical partition. The target logical partition may be newly created for the migration, is typically located on a separate, physical computer, and is configured to accommodate the state of the transferred logical partition.
In scenarios where a logical partition is migrating to another server computer, it may be necessary to account for and otherwise preserve storage operations, or page entries, affecting the state, e.g., stored memory, of the migrating logical partition. The preserved integrity of such entries may be necessary for the proper operation of the partition once it has migrated. Put another way, the state/entries for each page of a logical partition should be preserved or otherwise maintained during the migration to allow for a relatively seamless resumption of the migrated partition's work. For this same reason, the maintenance of partition pages, e.g., portions of memory, should not require noticeable downtime of the computer system.
Failure to maintain the state of the migrating partition could lead to a partition outage or a lack of data integrity in the migrating partition. Any such problem resulting from an unsuccessful migration can result in the loss of business and man hours. Manually tracking of the overwhelming amount of memory updates would be preclusively slow, tedious and complicated. Such potential problems may further translate into a reluctance to migrate partitions in instances where such transfers would otherwise improve system performance.
There is consequently a need for an improved manner of migrating data and associated processes within a logically partitioned environment.